


The Worth of the Wait (Witness)

by alicekittridge



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: A lot of it this time, Afterlife, Angst, F/F, I'm so sorry, POV Third Person, Past Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:33:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27259492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicekittridge/pseuds/alicekittridge
Summary: Sometimes ghosts have their own ghosts.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 1
Kudos: 37





	The Worth of the Wait (Witness)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this angsty piece in a speed-fever two days and sort of edited it in one, so if there are any issues, it's completely my fault. I should also note that I have plans to write about other characters, too, but these two live rent-free in my head. 
> 
> Dani has a very busy afterlife in this one. 
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading xx
> 
> \--  
> The title that isn't in parenthesis is graciously borrowed from Ivan & Alyosha's song by the same name.

> _And since it falls unto my lot_
> 
> _That I should rise and you should not…_

* * *

**T** here was something in the reading of ghosts Dani had done that mentioned souls were doomed to wander the grounds around which they died due to unfinished business. As to what that business was, the spectre had to find out on their own, a task that began as soon as one came to.

No such task was set forth when Dani woke the first evening after her death, collapsed on the shore of the lake on her knees, not knowing it was the same spot Jamie had knelt just hours earlier. No sense of purpose filled her, only the strangeness of the afterlife, the emptiness of the manor’s grounds, and a bizarre, echoing loneliness.

Here, Dani did not bear the weight of the first Lady of the Lake. No second gaze watched from within. No claws tore away pieces of her. She was Dani once again. Almost whole, but not quite1.

She walked the grounds to grow used to her new body and life. She mused that this must have been what the astronauts who landed on the moon felt like—terribly weightless, yet able to come back to the ground by sheer force of will. So light. Like floating on air. But she wasn’t hovering. The afterlife wasn’t nearly so stereotypical. There was grass underneath her feet, and gravel, and brick. Dani was pleased that the muted feel of them all did not terrify her. The downside, however, was everything she took in reminded her of Jamie. And Hannah and Owen and Flora and Miles. So much so that she dropped to her knees for the second time in the middle of the statue garden and allowed herself to feel another knife. It slid beside the one that’d pierced her chest at the sight of Jamie in the water, reaching for her, agonized screams distorted by the thick, choking medium. _I won’t,_ Dani had said. _Don’t reach out for me to take you; this is the only time I will not accept your hand._

The book said nothing about the loneliness one would feel in the afterlife, nor the emotions that ghosts were still capable of feeling, nor even the fact that ghosts could have their own ghosts.

—

Time was nearly impossible to tell here. The days varied in their colors, of course, so Dani knew the hours, but she could not count the days. Or the weeks. She only knew the beautiful grounds, once kept tame by Jamie and a series of others before her, were slowly being reclaimed. The hedges lost their shapes. The statues in the statue garden wore masks and robes of moss. The rose garden and the white iron table and chairs were covered in leaves and surrounded by weeds, and armies of aphids munched greedily on the wilting roses. The church was dark and drafty; the candles had dust gathering in them, and the benches were covered in it, too. Jamie’s beloved greenhouse was overgrown, looking the part of a houseplant jungle that was now home to spiders and large, fearless rats. Soon many varieties of leaves and arms of vines would cover the bench, concealing the evidence of a deep first kiss and—on a different day—a thick half-hour’s lovemaking.

Concealing life so that they might live their own. Jamie would say that, or something similar to it. Part of nature, innit? Inevitable. Uncontrollable, once set free.

Dani was not bound to the lake. Not entirely. And so she spent a series of nights on the greenhouse’s bench, on her bed of plants and cracking cushions, perfectly content to lose herself in memories that hadn’t been sharp for years.

—

It could have been months, or even years later, that Dani began to hear voices. They were faint and far away, like music drifting from an open window several stories up, the voices unidentifiable, the words a string of incoherence. There were no others on the grounds; what others there were had moved on to somewhere else the second the Lady of the Lake settled herself inside Dani. But the voices were there, whispering in the woods and the lake, the greenhouse and the church, wherever Dani managed to find herself. Was it possible, she wondered, for someone dead to lose their mind? It shouldn’t have been. It would be cruel of the afterlife to make her repeat an act that had already been done. The voices were not memory, either; memory did not tickle the eardrums or raise one’s hackles.

It didn’t take long for Dani to shrug the voices off, thinking them a new music serenading her world. She often fell asleep to them—a different kind of lullaby.

—

The first time Dani was called to the land of the living was an accident.

She was walking through the woods, admiring a golden sunset slashing through silhouetted branches on the way to the spot where Jamie’s carefully grown moonflower once sat. Dani seated herself on the log she’d occupied, watching the shadows lengthen on the iron the moonflower had used as an anchor to grow against, thinking of Jamie and her going-out-on-a-limb monologue, of the kisses that followed and the laughter-filled ascent up the stairs that led to them making love in Dani’s bedroom, with no hesitation after Jamie’s, “It’s not too fast?” A voice shattered her thoughts, clear as day, a whisper.

_“Where are you?”_

Jamie.

Heart leaping, feeling more alive than her new life had lately allowed her to be, Dani ran, ran through the woods and the gardens, past the empty greenhouse, church, and manor, calling Jamie’s name. “I’m here!” she shouted. “I’m here, Jamie!” No avail. No reward. Just the whisper, again and again. _“Where are you?”_

Once again, Dani found herself wading into cold water, and once again fell and sank, but it was not to the lake’s silty, reedy bottom.

There was water underneath her hands. And wood. Not even an inch of it, but still it lapped at her hands, an insistent, icy tongue. There was hissing. And further away, the sound of sirens. Dani stared at the floor. Light finished oak. Skinny pieces. _She knew this floor._

Looking up, in a state of dizzying disbelief, was looking into the flooding kitchen of the apartment. _Their_ apartment. The sprinklers were spraying water. Something must’ve caught fire, but Dani wasn’t looking for that. Her gaze was trapped by the cracked front door and the unmistakable figure of Jamie, soaked to the bone, sitting between the oven and the sink, the posture of someone who had slid there in defeat, not quite weeping but on the verge of it.

The strangest part was how ardently she stared into the water.

“Where are you?” Jamie said.

“Here,” Dani would have said, and reached out to her, had she not felt herself being pulled back.

—

Several times, the breaking through happened, each as jarring as the first, until Dani learned to expect it. Until, one winter evening, when the grounds of Bly were dusted with frost, she only thought of Jamie and was instantly over her shoulder. They were in The Leafling, the winter plants and flowers in full season. Outside, there was snow, and fresh flakes were falling like cigarette ash from a steely sky. Jamie was in dark jeans and a black turtleneck, her curls pinned up in a bun, a few unruly ones dangling over her eyes, her hands putting the finishing touches on a pot filled with pansies.

“It’s a very ironic name,” Jamie had said once, back when they first opened the shop and rotated the flowers out depending on the season. “Call this flower a pansy but it survives the winter.”

“Maybe we should call it a toughie,” Dani suggested. Jamie shook her head, smiling, but she ended up making a chalk art sign that read, “These toughies survive the winter!” and placed it appropriately in front of the pansy display. They’d sold out within the first two weeks.

The signs that were in the flower shop now were not written by hand in Jamie’s half-messy cursive. They were all typed and displayed on boards. Including the sign on the door, which was flipped to _closed._

There was life here, Dani realized, her heart seizing in her chest, continuing despite the gaping loss Jamie obviously still felt.

How many times, Dani wondered when she returned to Bly, to the greenhouse, had Jamie thought of giving up? It had to be several, by now.

It took a special sort of perseverance to overcome the call of death.

—

Time hardly existed at Bly, but Dani found a way to keep track of it. She watched Jamie and knew the months went by, staying longer and longer, until she hardly found herself at Bly at all.

She watched Jamie change. Her hair got longer and less wavy. Grey began to show. Slowly at first, and then they were as sudden as weeds. Dani watched efforts of romances, all of which ended in apologies and the showing of the ring she’d slipped onto Jamie’s finger in the nineties. She watched The Leafling change hands. Watched Jamie pack up the apartment and move into a small house in a different town. Watched her fly to Paris and step through the doors of A Batter Place for the first time in ages. Owen was still there, dressed in white chef’s uniform. And Hannah’s picture remained where it was, too, her kind, smiling face forever immortalized.

Jamie stood by the doors. Jet lag sagged her shoulders. Made her eyes droop like half-dead leaves. Yet there was determination, Dani saw, mixed with an oncoming wave of nostalgia.

Owen was a few tables away, smiling, pouring refills of wine into two guests’ glasses. He glanced in Jamie’s direction, owner’s instinct kicking in at the sight of someone loitering in the entryway, looking back at the customers, and then giving Jamie a long double-take.

“Please excuse me,” Dani heard him say.

He and Jamie approached each other slowly.

“My god,” were Owen’s first words to her, “you’ve gotten old.”

The laughter that erupted from Jamie’s mouth was the sweetest music.

They sat at the same table that’d seen them a little over a decade ago, talking over French cuisine and wine, until long after closing and long after everyone else left. There was much to say and then nothing at all, a silence settling over the old friends that was comfortable.

There was a bit of happiness in Jamie’s life at last.

—

Jamie’s life had changed since seeing Owen in Paris. It was lighter. She walked with new purpose. There was, however, one constant. Jamie always left doors cracked. Always left something filled with water—the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the tub, a watering can—and gazed into it, much like she had that day in the kitchen. The habit could have started long before that, Dani theorized, but there was no plausible way to be certain. The only thing that was certain was the statement these habits made: _I’ll wait for you._ In those moments, Dani’s heart ached in her chest, its own clenched, frustrated fist.

On a blustery spring day in 2007, Dani followed Jamie around her plant-populated kitchen as she had a conversation with Owen over the phone. Jazzy piano floated from a speaker somewhere Dani couldn’t see, the volume low. She only heard Jamie’s side of the talk.

“This makes me feel really fucking old.”

“Well, wasn’t she twelve the last time we talked to each other?” A smile. “I’m giving you shite, you moosher.”

A pause.

Her tone turned serious. “You’re sure you want me there?” A pause. “You know they might not remember me.” Silence. Then, with another smile, “All right, you’ve convinced me with your battering on about it.”

In the past, Jamie threw on whatever outfit was convenient: old, soft T-shirt tucked into worn jeans, jacket pulled on over it; paint-splattered overalls and flannel shirt; sweater and jeans and a grey-blue coverall caked with soil. Her style came together in the nineties. It was polished in the New Millennium. She planned her outfits with a little more care, and she looked stunning in all of them. It was, thought Dani, no wonder the younger women that floated in and out of Jamie’s life fawned over her.

The occasion she talked about with Owen was, much to Dani’s surprise, Flora’s wedding. The man she’d been smitten with at seventeen was the same one she was marrying at twenty- eight. Jamie marked the date in the calendar hanging on the fridge.

In the days that followed, a melancholy shadowed Jamie. Dani saw it on her face, and deep in her eyes. She believed Jamie was thinking about their own union, how they had to practically beg for it to be civil while all some people had to do was slide a ring on a finger and ask for a license. How Flora’s life stretched for acres ahead of her while Dani’s own was an uncertain countdown. Dani saw, as she’d gotten rare glimpses of, Jamie scribble the thoughts down in a notebook with yellowed edges. (She had usually left Jamie when she wrote. That time was hers alone.)

She turned the page. Her pen hovered.

Jamie began a new note.

> _We should have grown old together. Watched each other change. Kept track of the lines that appeared around our eyes and mouths. Made love until we were too ancient to do it properly. Found other ways. We should have had our whole lives ahead of us. It seems unfair I get to be the age I am. But we had our time, Poppins. Not many people get that._

The note wasn’t a goodbye. To Dani, it was more of a reminder.

**Epilogue:**

**Witness**

The asylum-turned-hotel was surprisingly cozy, even by dead people’s standards. Nestled in a sort of grove in Northern California, Dani liked the rustic look of the place and how pleasant it looked against the late afternoon sunlight shining through the trees. It had a sitting room just off the lobby, populated by comfortable couches. Despite the spring warmth, a fire crackled in the fireplace, and the wedding guests gathered around it, some with drinks in their hands, others empty-handed. They chatted amongst themselves until, rather abruptly, Jamie announced, “I have a story.”

Dani settled behind her, back to the warmth of the fire. Bly did not call back to her. Nothing held her but Jamie, whose command of the room was absolute.

She hung on every word.

She felt light. She felt like she could fly at the way Jamie narrated the story that held everyone so raptly; her voice wavered from tenderness to melancholy to, at the end, devotion. A sense of purpose.

It hit Dani as suddenly as cold water. Her purpose. Her unfinished business. It had only taken seven years and countless witnessing of someone perpetually in wait.

Jamie filled the hotel’s sink. And the bathtub. She cracked open the door, just a little, letting in a small bar of white light. She turned a chair to the door. Waiting. Expectant.

Dani knew then.

If Jamie waited for her, Dani would wait for her in return.

She set a hand on Jamie’s shoulder, a promise she would, hopefully, feel.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. A reference to my favorite book, Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"  
> \--  
> Other sources that inspired this piece: Hozier's version of "The Parting Glass," performed live on The Late Late Show


End file.
